Dhiraagu Web SMS widget using ASP VB.NET and AJAX

Yesterday, I didn’t have much work to do, so I decided to surf the net to find something interesting. And while I was reading some blogs at mvblogs.org I found a PHP script written by jaa, which sends web sms using the Dhiraagu’s web server. I don’t know much about PHP, but I wanted to write a similar script using ASP vbscript, the language that I have been using for the past 3 years. But due to the limitations in ASP vbscript I decided to move to ASP VB.NET to do the server-side scripting. (in classic ASP, http web request cannot be made without using a third-party component like AspHttp) In ASP VB.NET, the methods were much simpler than I thought. But it took about 5 hours of non-stop programming to complete the server-side part. In general, what this script does is, it passes the login information to the perl-script hosted at dhiraagu server, and when the user is authenticated, the perl-script sets a cookie named “Dhi” which has a value like ‘0653233’. After grabbing the cookie value from that page, the second request is made to the “send_message.pl” to send the message. I have also added some additional functionality to script, which will display the remaining SMS for the day and all validations are made on server-side. AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) is used to supply the form fields with required parameters. I will release the source code for the script after ‘beautifying’ and commenting the code blocks.

How to send Arabic email using CDOSYS in classic ASP

I have been trying this for a couple of weeks now and last night i have found a way that it could be done quite easily in classic ASP. Sending emails using the SMTP server in windows is quite easy, however i have been trying to do this for a client where he needs to send emails from the website using arabic characters when users make reservations from the website. After completing this page using a typical ASP page, i figured out that the arabic characters are displayed as ????? (question marks)..

As usual, i tried to solve this problem by searching the google to find a solution for this. I found that many people have faced the same problem as me, but couldn't find a solution. Then i tried to search the Microsoft website to find the members of the "CDO.Message" object. And finally i figured out that there is a property to change the charset of the message body.. and when i changed this charset to "utf-8" it worked!!


Here's the source code of the ASP file, so that anyone who faces this problem might find this useful..


set cdoMessage = Server.CreateObject("CDO.Message")
set cdoConfig = Server.CreateObject("CDO.Configuration")
cdoConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing") = 2
cdoConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver") = "127.0.0.1"
cdoConfig.Fields.Update
set cdoMessage.Configuration = cdoConfig
cdoMessage.BodyPart.Charset = "utf-8"
cdoMessage.From = "from@mail.com"
cdoMessage.To = "recipients@mail.com"
cdoMessage.Subject = "Arabic Email usin SMTP - CDOSYS"
cdoMessage.HtmlBody = "مرحبا بك فى المالديف"
cdoMessage.Send
set cdoMessage = Nothing
set cdoConfig = Nothing